For a moment, Trainer didn’t know what to say. If she were truthful, she wondered this herself. She cleared her throat. “I’m just doing my job,” she said. It was like a mantra that kept her sane. “Now… you get some rest. You’ll be fine, Captain, you’ll see.”
Stanton stared at her for a long moment. “That’s so easy for you to say.”
• • •
She left the usual orders for Stanton with the nurses: clean clothes, a hot meal. A mild sedative and some rest. She debated about ordering a stronger medication but decided against it. Better to let Stanton grapple with his demons with a clear head than with a mind fogged by drugs.
At the door, she stopped and glanced back down the long stretch of cots in the Quonset. Only five days of fighting, and we’re jam-packed and just getting worse. The Quonset was ten meters wide by forty meters deep and filled with a double row of cots, one row to a side. The fresh arrivals, those med-evaced from the front lines, lay on their cots, hands folded over their chests, and stared at nothing. There were empty beds, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have patients. Those soldiers who had been on-site for more than twelve hours were put to work: cooking, hauling supplies, cleaning. They were kept on-site for thirty-six hours, perhaps forty-eight. Then they were sent back to fight.
Damage control: If the term hadn’t been so accurate, she would’ve laughed because it sounded like something one did to fix a machine. But it was accurate because the military was a machine, and they—her patients, the ´Mechs, her—were the cogs that made that machine go. Long ago, the armed forces on Terra had given what psychiatrists like her did the nickname three-hots-and-a-cot. Someone had figured out that the best way to treat combat fatigue was not to med-evac soldiers far from the front lines. Taking them away from the action was actually debilitating and reinforced their sense of failure. The best option was to treat them as close to their fellow soldiers as possible, to keep them involved in doing a soldier’s work while driving home, over and over again, that they had a duty to the other men and women who were doing their jobs. Oh, yes, fear was fine. Fear was normal and, in fact, it was abnormal not to be frightened out of your wits in battle because a man or woman had a pretty good chance of dying.
So, she acknowledged her patients’ fears; she empathized with the sudden, sometimes shocking revelation of their own mortality—that they might be dancing on the razor’s edge between life and death, a difference that could be erased in the blink of an eye. She helped them through all these things—with kind words or harshness when she had to, with rest, clean clothes, a hot meal. And then, she sent a soldier back out to fight, and maybe die.
She despised what she’d become. The perversity of what she did. Every minute of it.
Trainer pushed out of the Quonset and into a blistering hot late afternoon at the lip of the Scorpion Plains. There was that constant pulsing roar of autocannons, and the vibrations from the battle were so much stronger outside that she felt them shiver up her boots and into her calves and thighs. The med unit was close enough for her to see the tiny hump of the mountain rising to the east. As she scanned the misty summit, she caught glimpses of the insect-like figures of BattleMechs boiling over the black rock, like ants dislodged from a hill.
She felt her blood chill in her veins. She hadn’t been able to make out any ´Mechs on the summit yesterday, but their presence confirmed her worst fears. The Eleventh, led by Colonel Linda McDonald, was continuing its relentless advance. The Twenty-Third was low on ´Mechs, and that was why even a single soldier like Stanton was so vitally important.
She turned her back on the volcano and stared out past the small village of Quonsets and tents to the middle distance. Not an inspiring sight: More lava flows marked here and there by spiked stands of silver swords, the only plants that could survive on the lava field. The sun was very hot—it hadn’t rained on the Scorpion Plains for almost a month—and her body responded to the sudden change in temperature by popping out little beads of sweat that trickled between her shoulders and wet the pits of her arms. The stench of battle was so much stronger out here, she could taste it: ash and grit and something oily. She made a face, spat out a gob of gray-tinged saliva. She was tempted to go back into the Quonset, or maybe head over to her quarters and duck into someplace relatively cool. But she had a lot of work to do—the soldiers just kept coming—and then there was the medical unit’s general briefing for later that evening. She really didn’t have the luxury of time.
Luxury. That’s what Stanton had said. What had made a battle-hardened man like Stanton crack? Trainer fished out a packet of cigarettes from her left breast pocket. She rarely smoked and thought it was a filthy habit. But smoking helped mask the taste of death in her mouth. She lit the cigarette, then smoked for a few moments, staring at and thinking of nothing, letting her mind drift the way the smoke billowed then dispersed on the wind. But then her restless thoughts settled on Jonathan.
Her vision suddenly blurred as the tears came. Stanton was the trigger, probably. They had the same eyes…
